To political pros, they are known as "the persuadables." By Nov. 6, swing voters in a handful of states will decide whether to rehire Barack Obama. Right now, no one's studying these voters more closely than Steven Law, president of American Crossroads. Mr. Law, who aims to spend $300 million to defeat Mr. Obama and liberalism generally, likes what he sees.

The 52-year-old former Republican Senate aide says that centrist voters are moving away from the president. The sense that President Obama is "a fine person" but lacks the ability to solve the country's problems "has only widened and deepened with people in the middle." Undecided voters "are among the people who are the most sour about the economy and how Obama's doing his job," Mr. Law adds. Meanwhile, these voters see Mitt Romney as "a guy who fixes things."

Given that Mr. Obama holds slight leads in several national polls and in key battlegrounds, Mitt Romney seems a long way from closing the sale. But "we feel pretty optimistic," says Mr. Law. Polls have barely budged in recent months even though "President Obama and his various minions have dumped $100-plus million" of negative ads on Mr. Romney. Meanwhile, "public confidence in Obama's management of the economy has just cratered."

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Mr. Law says their votes this fall will be driven in part by the summer of 2011. "The debt-limit fight of last July was much more of an important catalytic moment in the progress of the Obama presidency than most people focus on. In our own polling and focus-group research, that was the inflection point at which people began to seriously doubt whether President Obama had the skills necessary to solve the most important problems." Swing voters viewed the Beltway stalemate, which culminated in a downgrade of the U.S. credit rating, as "a sour, lousy process," one that Mr. Obama "was an unhelpful part of."

Obama getting blamed for the stalemate?! What madness is this??

Romney just might win this election: http://pandawhale.com/convo/5318/romneys-new-commercials-portray-him-as-likeable-sympathetic-and-kind-to-strangers